Colin de la Higuera

Who am I?

Holder of the UNESCO chair in technologies for the training of teachers by open educational resources at University of Nantes.
Member of the LS2N at Nantes University in Nantes, France.
37 years old (hexa, of course).
Ex-President of the French Informatics Society SIF.
Director of the ATAL Masters speciality at University of Nantes.
Trustee of the Knowledge for All Foundation.
Co-founder of the Class'Code project.
Head of the Teaching and Education Committee of the CominLabs.

Some links to events I support

I am member of the Fundamenta Informaticae editorial board.
I am member of the following Programme Committees for 2017:

No comment

I may have changed a bit

Research

Grammatical inference

Current work:

with Rémi Eyraud, Makoto Kanazawa and Ryo Yoshinaka, we edited in 2016 a special issue of Fundamenta Informaticae
with Jeffrey Heinz and Menno van Zaanen,: Grammatical Inference for Computational Linguistics. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, Morgan and Claypool Publishers 2015
with Rick Smetsers and Alexis Linard, investigating compression based language learning techniques
with Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza and Jose Oncina, we have been working on the expected edit distance between strings and PFA
with Rémi Eyraud, François Coste, Nicolas Beldiceanu, we want to start working on learning transducers

Recent and coming talks:

In May 2017, I am giving a talk at the London Machine Learning Meet-Up
In 2016 I gave talks at the Universities of Fukuoka and Kyoto on grammatical inference
Grammatical inference. Seminar at Xerox Research, Grenoble, June 2015.

Machine Learning

Current interests:

Learning is about intelligent forgetting
Teaching the topic: how to get the students to prepare the lectures?

Recent and coming talks:

I will be giving a talk at JERS 2017, in Nantes, in November 2017
Learning is about intelligent forgetting (2016, Kyoto, Tokyo, Sapporo)

Technologies for teaching

Current work:

Hugo Mougard, Matthieu Riou, Colin de la Higuera, Solen Quiniou et Olivier Aubert : The Paper or the Video: Why Choose? SAVE-SD 2015, Florence, Italy, 2015.
Hugo Mougard, Matthieu Riou, Colin de la Higuera, Solen Quiniou et Olivier Aubert: The Paper or the Video: Why Choose? SAVE-SD 2015, Florence, Italie, ay 2015.

Recent and coming talks:

Paris, June 18th, Ethics and Research for Learning
Nantes, November 2017, Teaching Computer Science
Open Education Resources: some research issues. Taichung (Taiwan) CELT symposium at COMPSAC, July 2015.
Enseigner l'Informatique, Conference in Besançon, France, at the ABDU conference, September 2015.

Publications

I have tried to organise these here.
A book published in March 2010

SIF

What is the SIF?

The Société informatique de France (SIF) is the French Learned Society in Informatics (or Computer Science).:

The SIF was created in May 2012, and I have been its president till February 2015.
The SIF works on the following definition of informatics: "L'informatique : la science au coeur du numérique.

What does the SIF do?

The SIF is arguing in favour of teaching informatics at school. The SIF insists that a crucial issue is that the teachers are well formed is the French Learned Society in Informatics (or Computer Science).

The SIF is interested in research and has been active in promoting the innovation issues.
report on forming the teachers.
1024 is the new journal launched by the SIF.

Some links to (2014) interviews and talks

2/4/2014. A video about teaching code.
8/7/2014. An article in 01.net.
21/7/2014. An interview in vousnousils.
24/7/2014. An interview in 01.net.
28/9/2014. An article in Slate.fr.
12/11/2014. An interview in vousnousils.
8/12/2014. An article in Slate.fr with Gilles Dowek.

K4A

What is K4A?

Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd (K4A) is a non-profit organization based in London (UK), formed as a successor to the PASCAL2 Network of Excellence, an FP7 research project and the main supporter of VideoLectures.Net. Among the over 60 members of the Foundation are some of the most important research and development centres in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe. The aim of the Foundation is to reduce the current gap between new trends in education, on the one hand, and advanced technologies in artificial intelligence, on the other, with the ultimate goal of securing the future of open education.

Some recent activities

Summary:

I was a co-organiser of the Internet of Education conference held in Ljubljana, in November 2013.
I was chair of the OCWC Global Conference held in Ljubljana in April 2014. The theme was: Open Education for a Multicultural World.
I coran project COCo at University of Nantes.

Logo

Contact me Feel free to mail me.

Colin de la Higuera

Laboratoire LS2N
UFR de Sciences et Techniques
2 rue de la Houssinière
BP 92208
44322 Nantes Cedex 03
France

(33) (0)2 51 12 58 33

(33) (0)2 51 12 58 97

Instructions (in French) to get to the lab by foot, car, plane or train are here